Europe's pioneering probe Rosetta battled breakdowns with navigation and communication with Earth after it ran into blasts of dust and gas from the comet it is tracking, mission control said Thursday.
Swooping close to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Rosetta "experienced significant difficulties" last weekend, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
